This article explores the evolution of the official Russian discourse on Chechnya during two major recent terrorist acts: the Dubrovka Theatre crisis in Moscow (2002), and the Beslan school siege (2004). By tracing the changes in the official image of the 'threat', this article challenges the assumption that this discourse has remained constant in the last few years. Instead, it characterises the dynamic of change at times of terrorist acts and beyond as an ongoing attempt by Russian officials to remove the Chechen issue from the political agenda, which precludes a real dialogue about or solution to the ongoing Chechen crisis. High profile terrorist acts in Russia have punctuated Russo-Chechen relations in recent years. A number of analyses of these acts have already been produced, with regards to the political and crisis management aspects of the development of the Russo-Chechen relations (Alexseev 2002; Stepanova 2004; Dolnik & Pilch 2003; Lynch 2005). However, less work has been published on the presentation of these events in the Russian official media. Since official political commentary on the subject of Chechnya has been curtailed since 1999, media analyses of such events have in themselves become important information sources and at times key turning points in Russian governmental discourse on Chechnya and terrorism in Russia.

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The global issue of humanitarian intervention has become more pronounced and complicated in recent years due to increasingly diverging views on addressing security crises between the West on one side and Russia and China on the other. Despite their support for the principles of 'Responsibility to Protect' (R2P), both Russia and China are wary of Western intervention in internal conflicts after the Cold War and have become increasingly critical of Western-led armed intervention in humanitarian conflicts. Unease in Beijing and Moscow over the multilateral intervention in the 2011 Libyan conflict and their ongoing opposition to Western policies in the Syrian Civil War since 2011 would seem to point to ever more coincidence in their negative views of American and Western intervention policies. A conventional wisdom has thus emerged that there is something akin to a Sino-Russian 'bloc', with near-identical policies of discouraging armed intervention within state borders under the aegis of humanitarian intervention or the R2P doctrine, signed in 2005

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How do securitising actors, in this case governments, go about de-securitising policy issues that have been securitised across multiple referent objects? Do such de-securitisations develop as a single or manifold process and with what political effect? These are pertinent questions that have been left underexamined in the (de)securitisation literature. In seeking to fill this gap, the aims of this article are twofold. Firstly, it calls for a greater focus on what happens in such cases, whereby the de-securitization process encompasses the multiple referent objects initially securitized. Secondly, it considers the case of Russia's policy of normalization towards Chechnya since 2000, as an exemplary case-study to illustrate the politics at play in the nature and practice of de-securitizations, especially if and how this plays out across multiple referent objects. This article argues for a more process-centered and longitudinal approach to the study of the security politics of (de)securitisations, especially as actors go beyond the singular-act of a securitizing move and towards the much broader consideration of managing and counteracting a particular security threat.